We -- librarians -- have choice, and I believe we ought to exercise it to a greater degree.

IMHO, libraries are about a synergistic combination of collection, organization, preservation, and dissemination of data, information, and knowledge. Libraries are not about one or the other of these things but their amalgamation. None is more important than they other. Collections without services are useless, and services without collections are empty; one without the other is like the sound of one hand clapping.

The amount of money our profession spends on access is much greater than the amount of money our constituents would be willing to pay. If students, researchers, or scholars had to pay for content on a per-article basis, then I believe students, researchers, or scholars would find alternative ways to disseminate and acquire their materials. If the costs are not worth it to them, then why should the costs be worth it to us? Put another way, I do not think it is not our responsibility to fund the scholarly communication process. We have choice. We are not legally obligated to license materials. Nor are we morally obligated. Try out this scenario. Figure out how much you pay in license fees for the Forestry Department. Pay the fee this year. Next year, give the Forestry Department the money, tell them it goes for licensing, and offer to do the work. The Forestry Department will sing. The year after that, when the fees to up, and the same about of money is given them, I predict they will say it is not quite worth it, and they will take some of the money to fund labs, personnel, etc. If it is not worth it to them, then why should it be worth it to us? Scholarship will not go down the toilet if we -- librarians -- stop licensing access, nor will libraries become obsolete. 

I'm not naive. For majority of time libraries have existed, access has been restricted in one way or another, but the restrictions have been less about money and more about politics, knowledge as power, and secrecy. Even today, archives restrict access to their materials for privacy reasons. Even collections such as the Code4Lib Slack channel archives are not accessible to members because: 1) members are not channel administrators, and 2) other members have not explicitly opted in to having their postings shared. Information wants to be free? Well, we need to qualify the definitions of "information" as well as "free". Again, I'm not naive. 

It is our self-imposed responsibility to preserve the historical record. As per LOCKSS, "Lot's of copies keep stuff safe." While publishers are not purposely being malicious, we -- librarians -- are unable to preserve the scholarly record if it exists in only one place. As far as those perpetual access contracts go, let's demand a practice run. Give us some of the data that we might be granted when the publisher might go out of business. Will it be in a form we can actually use? WordPerfect? Microsoft Word? DocBook? TEI? PDF? A password-protected zip file? If those companies go out of business, do you think they are going to set aside money to dissipate their content?

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Eric Morgan <[log in to unmask]>
Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship
University of Notre Dame